Daniel--
Zbblock http://www.spambotsecurity.com/zbblock.php will help block robo-spammers registering. It's pretty easy to use but I know some people are uncomfortable editing php or ftping to their hosts and I don't know you well enough to know where you sit on the continuum of dealing with software. If you need help ask me. (I know I'm new here, but I can still help on that.)
I recently installed zbblock at my blog precisely because the load from crawlers has been exploding. Oddly, in Oct/Nov I spent time trying to figure out how to auto-detect and bounce lots of these guys and created a side-blog containing about 3 posts discussing a few things. I was planning to discuss that more.
I think we might also need to figure out some way to help people bounce any nuisance bots that draw our sites bandwidth for their purposes. This includes things like picscout; web rumors suggest getty uses that for crawling.
Zbblock http://www.spambotsecurity.com/zbblock.php will help block robo-spammers registering. It's pretty easy to use but I know some people are uncomfortable editing php or ftping to their hosts and I don't know you well enough to know where you sit on the continuum of dealing with software. If you need help ask me. (I know I'm new here, but I can still help on that.)
I recently installed zbblock at my blog precisely because the load from crawlers has been exploding. Oddly, in Oct/Nov I spent time trying to figure out how to auto-detect and bounce lots of these guys and created a side-blog containing about 3 posts discussing a few things. I was planning to discuss that more.
I think we might also need to figure out some way to help people bounce any nuisance bots that draw our sites bandwidth for their purposes. This includes things like picscout; web rumors suggest getty uses that for crawling.